The History of the Thought of Rites and Music in Japan before the Tenth Century: A Land That Bred Compilation of Ancient and Modern Waka      

You Haiyan

Abstract: The thought of rites and music in ancient China is a kind of thought combining the “rites” which regulate the external behavior and the “music” which cultivates the internal emotion, as well as the root for cultivating the people, changing the customs, and managing the statecraft. During the seventh century to the early ninth century, Japan was constructing a state of law. It widely introduced Chinese laws and bureaucracy, and at the same time, copied the thought of rites and music as the ideology. In the middle ninth century, Japan launched reform of music system, along with the narrations on rites and music disappearing from the national history. That did not mean the thought of rites and music going extinct in Japan, but it had transformed into specific forms of nourishing the mind and edifying the virtues from political slogans, which was a reflection of the deepening of its acceptance. Besides, the localized thought of rites and music in Japan also developed into the guiding idea in compiling the collection of Waka under the empirical order, which could be represented by Compilation of Ancient and Modern Waka.